I lunged to my feet. Grabbed the flask of wine, because I was thinking that it had my fingerprints on it. I smeared blood on the neck and the label. I wasn’t thinking really clearly; I guess I was hoping that any security feeds would have been damaged by the blast and wouldn’t have shown me clearly enough for immediate identification.
She’d worn one suicide harness. Two explosive bottles. There was another one at her apartment storage locker. If I ran, I could get there. It would open to my passcode. I could collect the other harness, and follow Niyara into glorious oblivion.
It was the most stunning protest I could think of, dying to oppose the Synarche, doing a little damage along the way. Self-immolation plus.
Surely her sacrifice, my sacrifice, could not be in vain.
When I got to her apartment and crashed into the tiny workroom where I’d assembled the bombs, it was empty. There was nothing on the desk at all.
I washed my hands and recycled my bloody clothes. I slid back into the crowd still holding the wine and tried to plan what to do next. My heart was racing in a frenzy that even my fox could barely control. Did the fact that my harness was missing mean that the constables were on to us? On to both of us? Or just her?
I could build another harness. I could—
There were monitors going everywhere, full of the news of the attacks. Attacks. Plural.
As in, more than one.
That was how I found out that in addition to the suicide bombing of Niyara Omedela, there had been a second suicide bombing that dia as well. Her wife, Amelie Omedela, exploded over in H sector. Used the explosive harness I’d built for myself to do it. Killed five people for no good reason except some political philosophy from the dark ages.
One that I subscribed to, too. Or that my clade subscribed to for me, and which I had never questioned, because we were not built to question such things and we never really learned how.
I hadn’t known she had a wife.
I didn’t build a harness. I got very drunk, finishing that flask of wine all by myself.
The constables had picked me up before I got sober.
? ? ?
Somehow I fell asleep. This surprised me, when I woke up from it and realized that my eyes were crusty and my mouth was dried out like space.
I had no idea how I’d managed to unwind enough to go under, and no idea how long I’d been asleep for. Possibly I was too exhausted with memories and the volatile tears that memories seemed to drag from me at every opportunity now. Lability. That was the old-fashioned term. People under stress—physical, emotional, hormonal—used to be labile, before rightminding and before more primitive tech like mood regulators and so on.
I was labile now.
I was also still full of images and recollections, and they seemed the clearer for sleeping on them. Perhaps I had been dreaming, processing and refining old memories in the way you’re supposed to process and refine newer ones. And I felt, for the first time perhaps, the full impact of what Farweather’s booby trap had done to me.
That, all by itself, made me want to peel my own skin off with my fingernails. It was in me, this terrible history. It was a part of me, and I could not get it out.
But maybe I owed justice to the Ativahikas, if I could manage it.
If I could even keep myself alive.
I remembered now. I . . . had spent a lot of time being interrogated, and eventually went before Justice, where it was decided after a lengthy series of hearings, held in camera because I was a legal minor, that Nyumba Yangu Haina Mlango had brainwashed and controlled me, and that I—and all other minor children—were to be removed from their care.
The clade itself was to be disbanded, and its members subjected to incarceration or Recon.
They were given eight hours to surrender themselves and their children to Justice.
? ? ?
You can probably guess how this ends. They didn’t turn themselves in.
They committed suicide en masse, making the decision as one. If they couldn’t be together, and content; if they couldn’t avoid being unhappy, even for a little while; if they were expected to take individual responsibility for their collective decision and suffer consequences for it . . .
. . . they did not wish to.
They killed the children, too.
CHAPTER 22
AS FOR ME? I SURVIVED.
Because I was in custody, I survived.
I was the one who lived.
My machine memories were edited. Because meat memories tend to be subsumed to outside narratives, the basic result was that my entire memory of events was . . . repaired. Replaced with memories that suited a past I was deemed able to live with, as part of my rehabilitation process. I hadn’t ever been supposed to find out what happened to my clade, but it came out at the trial, so out of kindness Justice took it away again.
I consented.
Wouldn’t you?
I was given the opportunity to have input into constructing a personality that the court deemed socially acceptable. Then I received intensive rightminding and became the new, improved Haimey Dz.
I had built myself from a kit. With some extensive professional assistance, naturally.
It was better to think my clade had cut me off after I left them than to remember what they had actually done. I wish I still had no idea what had happened to my crèche-sisters. The fact that I hadn’t realized that I didn’t know what had become of them until I was trapped in a runaway alien starship headed far up and out from the Milky Way—that I had, in fact, more or less forgotten all about them, categorizing them with the rest of the clademothers and other relations I thought I’d left behind or who had frozen me out—was a fresh and scouring little grief right up inside me, like a bubble behind my ribs.
I’d been a dupe, all right, but I hadn’t been Niyara’s dupe. She’d actually done something to protect me. Something she didn’t have to do.
Something that indicated that she knew what was going on, what my clade had done, and that she actually cared about me. And for almost two decans, I’d been blaming her for everything. When my own family had been the ones to dupe me. To sacrifice me. And to make me think it was my own idea.
And then to leave me holding the bag, and the whole moral weight of everything they’d done.
Who was it who said the truth would set you free?
Freedom tasted a lot like choked-back vomit.
? ? ?
You never want to puke in microgravity if you can help it, and so I hung on to my bile, though it was a narrow triumph and a dubious one.
When I, itchy-eyed and somewhat the worse for exhaustion, came back into our impromptu habitation chamber, Farweather was awake and alert. She was doing calisthenics to the rattling of her chain, and she looked calm and cheerful and well rested. I wanted to kick her in the chin, but instead I emptied her slops, then went over to the mess kit and knocked together coffee and two bowls of porridge. Farweather was watching me, bird-bright. I neither looked at her nor spoke until the food was done, and she didn’t say anything either.
I brought her a bulb of coffee and a bowl of porridge (algae and creamed grain . . . delightful) before stepping back to the pad-couch opposite to eat my own breakfast.
I didn’t have much appetite. Hers seemed to be fine.
I said, “You wanted me to remember that I made the bombs.”
“I did,” she said.
“It’s my fault all those people died.”
“Pretty much,” Zanya said. “Are you going to stop condescending to me now?”
I still didn’t look at her. I drank my coffee. The porridge wouldn’t go down on its own. I mean, it was a struggle on my best dia. Todia, it was actively nauseating. Or maybe I just didn’t feel like eating.
“Look,” Zanya said, “I do feel like I know you, a little.”
I snorted. “We’ve been sleeping on the same deck plates for decians now.”
“I told you I had an ayatana from Niyara.” She stretched, both hands above her head, lifting one shoulder and then the other. I heard her spine crack. Gravity.
“I told you I didn’t believe you. Twice, I think.”
She smiled at me. “Fact doesn’t care if you believe in it.”
“And you’ve reviewed this putative recording.”
“I have.” The corners of her mouth curved down as she lost the smile. “She was one of ours, you know.”
“I figured that out eventually.” The possibility that she wasn’t lying left me agitated, edgy.
She sipped her coffee, savoring. “She cared about you.”
“I figured that out eventually, too.” I pushed my porridge at her, unable to waste resources no matter how badly I wanted her to go to hell. She took it with a look of surprise, but set the bowl inside her empty one and went to work polishing off the remains. She was as hungry as I ought to be.
Farweather finished the greenish, unappealing gruel and stifled a burp behind her hand, looking momentarily uncomfortable. Neither one of us was used to getting enough food anymore.
She set the bowls aside and picked the coffee back up. “Was this an apology?”
“Do I have something to apologize for?”
Echoes of a petulant, inadequately rightminded adolescent.
“It seems like you think you do.” She crossed her long legs and leaned back.